


Merry and Wise

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: AU, F/F, Gauda Prime Day, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21814855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: The rapprochement between Blake and Avon is inconvenient for each, but in a different way. Oh, and assume that "Rumours of Death" takes place a week after "Hostage". AU, but with canon levels of self-awareness.
Relationships: Kerr Avon/Roj Blake, Servalan/canon female character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	Merry and Wise

1  
Avon didn’t think he could make much headway against four troopers, but at that early stage he still had his pride. He was not looking his best when they hauled him into the prison governor’s office, which had been commandeered by the Supreme Commander. Avon blinked, wondering if that could possibly have been her uniform. Although, as he correctly surmised, that was by no means the most pressing question facing him.

“If you help me, things will be…not quite as bad for you,” the Supreme Commander said. “If you don’t, they’ll be quite a bit worse.”

“I’ve nothing left to lose,” Avon said.

“That’s just where you’re wrong, Avon,” Servalan said, picking up her cue. “We do know about the visa seller, you know. The man you murdered. If you say it was self-defense, that won’t wash when you kill someone in the course of a crime. So if you wonder why you were sent to Cygnus Alpha and not summarily executed, the answer is that you can be of use to us.”

She opened a live link, gave Avon a second to verify that it was live, and then said, “As you can see, she is—for the moment—alive. Corpses don’t scream, and dead bodies don’t bleed.” 

There was just a second of a sound file—“Please, Avon,” sobbed before the screen went black. 

“As I’m sure you’ve figured out—your file says that you’re clever--Anna Grant was arrested as well. And no doubt you feared that she did not survive the process, but she has—just. As to what is going to happen to her, well, that’s up to you.”

“What do you want?”

“Blake. Killing him would have created too many problems, but that is not to say that shipping him off to Cygnus Alpha is a simple solution.”

Avon thought that, given enough hydrochloric acid and a plastic tub, the Federation could have achieved at least a simple precipitate, but restricted himself to “I daresay it isn’t a walk in the park for him either.”

“Keep an eye on him, bearing in mind that Anna is our surety for the accuracy and completeness of your reporting.” 

“And if I do a good job, you’ll set us free? How long for?”

“That is rather a lot to wish for. Considering the gravity of your crimes. It’s one thing to bluff when all you’ve got is a pair of deuces. Something else entirely if you haven’t any cards at all, just two draughts and a tiddlywink.”

“In that case,” Avon said, “I accept.”

2  
Captain Leylan didn’t like having a Central Security agent foisted on his civilian ship, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Leylan, an aficionado of military history, had read that in the pre-Atomic days, Soviet embassies always had an assistant naval attaché, so you could always find a KGB agent if you needed one in a hurry. 

3  
“A little present,” Servalan said. “For services rendered. Or perhaps an advance payment.”

It was a photograph of Anna just her head and shoulders. Avon recognized the snapshot. They had gone to a concert, then walked along the promenade at Level 16 and ate ice cream cornets. Servalan held it up, just out of Avon’s reach.

“Say ‘thank you’ nicely,” Servalan taunted.

Avon knew that if he’d been asked about it, in his cell, an hour earlier he would have said he wouldn’t make himself say it, that he’d throw himself at Servalan and break her neck and he wouldn’t care that he’d survive her only a minute or so. But he found that, at least at that instant, he wanted to live. If he was going to survive, he wanted the picture (and the pain it was going to cause him) very much. He didn’t think he could ever forget Anna, even for a single minute, but in case he did? 

“Thank you,” he said. She patted his cheek. “Well, I enjoyed that,” she said. She pressed a buzzer and detailed only two troopers to drag him back to his cell. Two more days before the London’s departure. 

4  
It was a nice enough flat, in a fashionable Alpha faubourg, and so it should have been when the rent was 3,500 credits a month. Anna submitted a reimbursement voucher to Central Security for 4,000 a month. As befitted the Senior Service, Servalan billed Space Command for 4,500. 

“Hullo, darling,” Servalan said. “Out of the way, I simply must have a bath.”

Anna said nothing. It wasn’t the sort of flat where the hot water would ever run out, and she’d showered already, after her starring role. She scraped an errant speckle of prop blood off her forearm. It was mostly corn syrup, so it was sticky even when dry. She suspected that she’d be brushing bits of it out of her hair for days. 

“Were you lying to me before, darling? Or perhaps trying to make me jealous? I didn’t think he was up to much.”

Anna wished that her teeth had snapped shut less audibly. “I’m sure he does much better voluntarily.” She grinned gamely. “And of course I want to make you jealous, sweetheart. What we have is so exciting, we wouldn’t like it to become dreary and routine.” Anna often wished that she had been assigned to a man whom Central Security wanted to keep an eye on. Most of them were middle-aged at least, which meant that she’d be off the clock as soon as they were sated and snoring. But as it was, she wasn’t finished until Servalan said she was. No wonder Servalan hated sex toys: not only were they labor-saving devices, but the gadgets themselves had no objection to the transaction.

The communicator chimed, and the deliveryman with one prawn curry and one order of venison with lingonberry sauce, was so terrified by the two thugs uniformed as doormen escorting him upstairs that he just turned over the food with a submissive bob of his head and rushed off before Anna could even think of tipping him.

5  
Avon knew that, in context, having his own cell was a luxury, to be appreciated for its fleeting glory. His depression lifted a little, knowing that Anna had survived, but that tipped him into agony about what she must have gone through. Must be going through. He tried to calculate the odds that he would be able to give Servalan enough actionable intel for Anna, at least, to be freed. He thought it was incredibly remote. Then multiply it by the chance of ever getting off Cygnus Alpha alive himself, and ever seeing her again. And then he wondered what she would say to him, for getting her into the mess in the first place. She wasn’t really the forgiving sort. 

It did seem a mean trick to play, but it was all too bad for Blake, who meant nothing to him. Surely the man couldn’t be a big enough fool to forget that he would be under surveillance at every moment. He wouldn’t trust anyone enough to say anything that would be passed along. 

6  
“Why are we even here?” Avon asked his contact. “The prisoners, I mean. Why not just shoot the lot of us before we leave Earth, then trouser the payment?”  
“You’d be surprised. Leylan’s a man of honor—well, in some ways—and he wouldn’t be doing with anything like that. No, we’ve got to go to Cygnus Alpha, no question about it. And then you lot are staying and we’re turning round.”

Which put paid to the idea of suggesting that he fix the running logs and split the profits. Avon shrugged. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. At least a plurality of the crew would have to be involved. Getting rid of Avon himself would simultaneously increase the share of the other conspirators and get rid of a witness, and they’d probably be able to retrieve the code from the computer and repeat the wheeze for each future load of prisoners. 

7  
Most of the time, Avon felt like a man condemned to stand endlessly on a bridge, in a cold rain, waiting to proffer a satchel of cut-up newspapers in exchange for the two-day-old corpse of the kidnap victim. Or, as politicians say, a mutually productive exchange of ideas. 

His fellow prisoners were not the companions Avon would have chosen for longer than (in the case of the few attractive ones) a one-night stand. The prospect of a lifetime with them, however abbreviated, was distressing. Fortunately, there was no reason to try to cultivate their grimy good-will, and in fact every reason to keep them at arm’s length. The less he knew about them, the less he could report or have extorted from him, and the less likely they were to discover his Establishment connections.

It did cross his mind that removing Blake would simplify the equation. But that wouldn’t be direct enough self-defense for him to feel entirely comfortable about it. Anyway, the Federation had specifically decided not to kill Blake, when they had all the resources in the world and could do it with impunity, so they probably wouldn’t like his amateur effort any more than Alpha mothers liked jewelry made by their infants out of macaroni and poster paint. The difference was that the Federation wouldn’t tell the nanny to give the child a kiss as a thank-you for the lovely necklace.

For the first few months, he didn’t have much of significance to report, apart from a rumor that, even if somewhat exaggerated, he thought would interest Servalan. (Subsequently to be +CONFIRMED+)

Avon had the good fortune to alienate a whole tableful of them at once. He got to insult Vila, to his face. He got to insult, by implication, the crewmembers who couldn’t do a passable job of altering the readings. He got to turn his back and walk out on the infuriating, hazardous lot of them, although he couldn’t go very far. Behind the door between the recreation area and the dormitory, he could hear Blake say, (in response to Jenna’s suspicion and hostility) “Oh, he’s bright. He’d already thought of it.” Bright? BRIGHT? Forgetting for a moment that he actually could do it, Avon vowed to take revenge on Blake for that. 

Vila needed it spelled out, of course. “He fixes the log, the crew dump us, pocket the profit, and set him free,” Blake said. There’s no moralist like a career criminal outside his own métier, so Vila said, “That’s immoral. The cold-hearted murdering—let’s kill him now before he can do it.” Avon was almost sorry that his stratagem had worked so well. He thought that Vila had never had a chance in life; under more favorable circumstances, he could have turned out to be a passable con artist. 

8  
Well, Avon thought, why not? Some ways of not getting to Cygnus Alpha were better than others, but most of them were better than getting to Cygnus Alpha. Blake’s plan, with the right assistance, might work. 

Close up, during the personally tailored recruitment pitch, Avon saw that Blake’s eyes were amber, with glints of malachite. 

9  
It was with some trepidation that Mr. Artix opened the commlink to Servalan’s space station. He doubted that there could be enough cunnilingus in the universe to get him out of this one.

“Well, ma’am, there was a bit of trouble, as you may have seen on Captain Leylan’s report.”

“It did take some nerve for him to submit it. I shall put in a recommendation that he receive the Thessalurian Star of Valor. Posthumously, after I’ve had him staked out on an anthill. But why didn’t you pass along Avon’s report on the impending insurrection? He was tasked with keeping an eye on Blake.” _And you were tasked with keeping an eye on Avon_ went without saying.

“Well, you see, Supreme Commander, that’s the thing, he didn’t tell me about it. Fact is, he was one of the ringleaders of the…disturbance. Even attacked one of the computer technicians. Luckily Ensign Gouraviev was all right with a couple of paracetamol and a plaster, but it could have been worse.”

“How many casualties?”

“All that’s in the report, haven’t you read it, ma’am?”

“I had one of my aides give me coverage. So, have Blake and Avon been executed?”

“Ah, no, that was the plan, but…believe it or not, we were just putting down the…disturbance…when a huge alien spaceship drifted past us. No one’d ever seen anything like it, even the ones who really are in the Civil Administration.” Mr. Artix could see a faint light of hope, and kept talking as he formulated a plan. “So Captain Leylan sent across a couple of men, but someone, or, to be fair, something on the ship killed them straightaway. So Leylan sent Blake, and Avon, and Stannis—the girl, you know, there was just the one—to have a look, because they were supposed to be dead anyway, so there was nothing to lose.”

“And are they?”

“Dead, you mean? Well, I can’t tell one way or the other, Supreme Commander, because next time we looked, the ship wasn’t drifting any more, it took off like clappers, and we couldn’t catch up. They probably are dead, though.” He paused, his mouth open to change feet, but then saw the way forward. “So that’s good news.”

“How, precisely, is that good news?”

“You see, Supreme Commander, if they’re dead, that’ll show the remaining prisoners not to try it on over the next four months we’ve got them. And if they’re not dead, it’s an awfully big ship—five times the size of the London at least—all you’ve got to do is find them, and it would be worth quite a bit even for salvage. Well, of course, you’d turn it over for Space Command to analyze, but that’d be good for a gong at least. And if you haven’t filed your report as yet, it could be a surprise that you can bring out when you’ve got it, nobody knows about it yet.”

“I admire your patriotic spirit,” Servalan said, declining to offer him a finder’s fee in any form other than at least temporary ongoing survival.

10  
Avon believed that, giving it his best effort, he could at least have succeeded in seducing Jenna. If, of course, he could ever look at another woman when he was still mourning Anna. And he was almost, or fairly, certain that, given her pragmatic approach to economics, he could have convinced her to monetize the Liberator. Although Jenna was awfully fond of the ship.

The circumstances compelled him to give it his worst effort, with a laughably crude and premature approach that perfectly served his objective of making her distrust and dislike him. 

As for the other female crewmember, Avon thought the best thing about Cally was the near-orgasmic wave of relief that engulfed him when he realized she couldn’t read his mind. 

11  
The nights when he didn’t dare sleep, and the stress clenching his back, gave him a hectic courage. Any day he got killed was a day when he could stop walking the knife-blade. There were plenty of times when he wanted to confess all and throw himself on Blake’s mercy. But it never happened, until the affair of the frozen maniacs, during and after which he found himself throwing himself on lots of things of Blake’s so it—that is to say, the opportunity--just never came up. 

12  
It wasn’t all bad, although when he strung together a few moments of enjoyment, he was crushed by guilt. Anna, if she was still alive, certainly wasn’t enjoying herself. And if she wasn’t alive, and there was an afterlife, he had probably dragged her down in the next life as well as this one. He was relieved when dreams about her (always Gustav Dore illustrations of the consequences of his failure) became less frequent. 

A favorite entertainment medium had become infeasible. Even if he thought he deserved pleasure, he bounced off the idea of thinking of Anna, and it seemed disloyal to think about someone else and tedious not to think about anybody at all. 

Avon knew it was only to be expected that his body would react to deprivation. He dreamed that Blake had hauled him along on another pointless mission. Another day, another quarry. Suddenly they were surrounded by troops of monkey-spiders, chittering away, all clever little green faces and spindly legs. Avon drew his gun and sighed heavily at the thought of having to kill all of them, he knew that as soon as one lot splattered against the green dirt another lot would arrive, it was hopeless.

But then somehow Blake got them onside, Avon couldn’t imagine where Blake learned to speak Monkey-Spider, although he did co-opt the taxi money and Nanaimo bars from the inside pocket of Avon’s jacket. The monkey-spiders chittered happily, and they formed themselves into groups and shoveled through the dirt until they found the crystals and heaped them up at Blake’s feet. And then they went away leaving Blake and Avon to celebrate the success of the mission. There was springy suns-warmed orange moss to lie on. And the comforting rumble of whatever it was Blake was saying. It sounded better with Avon’s ear pressed to his chest.   
Avon woke up and propelled the sheets into the laundry chute and thought, Blake? BLAKE? and shrugged.

13  
Avon didn’t think it was at all practical to kill Blake himself. After awhile, he began to object to anyone else doing it either. There was little prospect of talking Blake out of buccaneering through the galaxy being a bad example to future military historians. Perhaps, though, in his role as the shadow cabinet and not-all-that-loyal-but-under-duress opposition, Avon could slow down the march to disaster. Some of Blake’s plans were discarded as a result of ruthless critique. Other plans ground forward, but took rather longer than Blake wanted, so at least the universe would continue to contain Blake a little longer. In fact, although neither of his employers approved or even was aware of this unilaterally imposed Christmas truce, Servalan should have been grateful. Fewer battles meant less expense and less diminution of Federation troop strength.

Blake was the sort to pay his debts. An obligation to turn over Liberator once they got to Earth could be counted on to keep them away from Earth for a while, with a bonus insurrection from every shipmate who thought the ship wasn’t Blake’s to give away. That could take ages.

14  
One sleepless night, he stopped revolving through his cocoon of sheets and sat up. He could buy some time by informing Servalan that Blake (who Avon wouldn’t have trusted to change a bicycle tire) was a brilliant engineer whose capture should be delayed long enough for him to make additional discoveries that the Federation could scoop up. Obviously Blake wouldn’t go quietly, and would inevitably be damaged in the act of capture, so he wouldn’t be up to much sophisticated research. Avon reminded Servalan that it wasn’t commutative. She could disassemble Blake, or arrange another show trial, after he achieved the promised technological breakthroughs, but it wouldn’t work the other way around. You could have your rebel and eat him too, but not eat and have him.

Having a cipher machine helped. In the period between getting a cipher machine and Servalan figuring out that he had one, Avon was able to bounce a few messages through a series of relays, celebrating oddly bloodless victories over Blake’s hoodlums, but with cautious praise of Liberator’s glorious technology (OEM and retrofit). Avon worried a little about that: he wanted Servalan to think that capturing Liberator would be too difficult, but he couldn’t make her think that it was a load of disposable rubbish. 

He crossed his legs—which took some doing in boots that skimmed the kneecap and just kept on going—and continued to act as advance man for his master the Marquis de Carrabas. I’m doing all this, he thought, and getting nothing but catfood. Typical.

Soon, Avon made some sketches to flesh out his fiction. If the gadget worked, then it would buy him valuable time out of the Federation’s view. If not, and he was captured, the technology transfer idea might save him too. It was good enough that it might even save Anna and justify a cash bonus large enough for freedom and safety. 

But then it turned out that the Federation had deflector shields of their own. Bastards.

15  
There were many enthralling challenges in learning about Liberator and her astonishing technology, and Orac was more intellectually stimulating than most of the people who had annoyed Avon in the past. Sometimes, after a particularly destructive episode of re-landscaping the Federation, or a particularly successful evasive maneuver, he even dared to fantasize finding a way out for all of them. But his fantasies hit a stone wall. He couldn’t imagine the three of them together, with Anna pottering about the garden and Blake presiding over the tea table, or Anna as a titan of commerce, Blake as a mid-level bureaucrat. (Avon couldn’t see anyone putting Blake in charge of anything important.) There was no possibility that they would play nicely, turn out their toes, and share their toys.

16  
Then there was that business with the weedy puppet prince. The problem with pursuit ship attacks was that either they didn’t know that Avon was—well, at least to a certain extent—on their side, so they’d be perfectly chuffed to kill him anyway. Or they did, and were under strict orders to tie up a loose end. So Muggins couldn’t just leave Blake and the others down there to get on with it, oh no, he had to go get them. 

With a little more breathing room, he could just have disappeared with the whole universe to get lost in. Which was a whole universe any corner of which Anna could have been concealed in (or her molecules scattered in after the incinerator in some prison had done its work). Each time he considered handing Liberator over to Servalan and having done with it, he knew that he hadn’t spun it out long enough yet. Scheherezade quickly figured out that she needed a Thousand Nights and a Night, not Three Nights and the Sharp Edge of a Scimitar. 

17  
Avon recognized that he had let his judgment become clouded on a vital matter. Anna must be dead. He would have commemorated the anniversary of her death, if he had known what it was. Even if you could trust any politician, there was no point trusting Servalan. Her first words were probably an election-year promise to her nurse to increase her base pay by 15%. 

18  
“It hasn’t turned out entirely to plan,” Blake said cheerfully. Vila had stopped being surprised at Blake still being surprised when his plans didn’t pan out, considering how often they didn’t. 

“I thought he’d be a bit less bolshy, you know, it’s hard not to feel a degree of sympathy with someone you’re…”

Vila craned his neck to see if Avon was lurking about, he often was, but they were apparently not being eavesdropped on. Vila didn’t have any particular opinions on male sexual allure, but he thought that, adapting a scale of Girl, he’d rate Avon somewhere between Cally and Jenna. Closer to the Cally end of the spectrum really.  
“Yeah, but it’s like sunspots,” Vila said. “There might be one less, but who’d notice?”

“I wonder if I’ve allowed myself to be influenced?” Blake mused. “Avon’s perpetual go-slow, work-to-rule agenda may have deprived us of some worthwhile targets.”  
Vila thought that it was unfair, Blake having a bit of crumpet when the rest of them had to go without. What sort of rebel wouldn’t lean over the back fence and ask Avalon for a lend of a cup of plastique and a couple of girls who fancied Vila? Not like there wasn’t room to put them up. But it was worth it for Blake to have a satisfying sex life if it reduced the number of times he tried to get them all killed.

19  
The Blake Family Reunion on Exbar did not meet Avon’s expectations. It was bad enough when Travis was stubbornly determined to kill Blake when he was still on the clock. As a freelance, he had nothing else to do with his time. It was a commonplace of the cheap sensation fiction Avon read for the morally compromised protagonist to clean up the even more corrupt town by setting one faction of hoodlums against the other, and then getting out of the way in the nick of time. Alerting Servalan to the trajectory of her ex-employee was likely to remove at least the greatest threat to Blake’s survival, or the greatest threat to Avon’s survival, or even the quinella. 

Over the course of the following week, Avon mused that: getting shot didn’t improve with familiarity, although he knew it was his own damn fault; that Blake was surprisingly forgiving of his uncle’s compelled betrayal; and that Blake was never, ever, going to kill Travis. Avon wondered if Blake was as exhausted by the cost of survival as he was, and equally willing to have someone take the decision out of his hands.

20  
“It’s happened at last,” Blake said tightly. “Everything I’ve waited for. Everything my whole life prepared me for. I received a communiqué—Orac, display it,”

“I am very busy,” Orac said. By now everyone was resigned to this excuse. This was no time to provide information that would only cause unnecessary distress.

“Oh, very well,” Blake said. “The message is from Sula Chesku, who is leading an insurrection…on Earth. She’s summoned me back to take over once she occupies Residence One and arrests Servalan. You can rely on me, Avon, I’m a man of my word. Get me to Earth, and then the Liberator is yours.” 

“I hardly think Jenna will acquiesce in that.” Avon wondered if Zen would. Zen had been a factor in enough own-goals to wonder what its alignment was. 

“Jenna will be fighting by my side,” Blake said. “She’ll be glad for me, once she finds out. I thought you would be, too. I thought that I’d persuaded you…” 

Avon tried to concentrate, fighting the feeling of his head floating away to the ceiling. “You can’t do this, Blake,” he said. “It’s simple suicide.” I always thought his death and mine would be linked in some way, he thought. “And who is this Chesku person? I’ve never heard of her, have you?”

“That’s a good thing, in a way,” Blake said. “The desire for freedom is universal, Avon. It’s not confined to a small coterie. We can’t expect to know everyone who is part of the struggle. And of course there are those that will rally to us once they see what’s possible.” 

If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.

21  
Once they landed on Earth and got to the inner precincts of Residence One, many things happened, more or less at once.

“Jolly good, Avon, you’ve done very well,” Servalan said. “And here’s your reward.”

“The ship?” Avon said. He might have mentioned that in one of his increasingly infrequent reports.

“No, of course not, I’ll be taking that. But there’s someone here you’ve been waiting a long time to meet.”

“Have you betrayed me?” Blake said. 

“Inefficiently,” Avon said. “I’m sure I would have done better, if my heart had been in it.”

“Oh, Avon. I always trusted you, from the very beginning.”

“And the more fool you.”

The door opened, and two people came in. Given their long history, Blake recognized Travis, and he recognized the other from Orac’s message.

“Sula Chesku,” Blake said.

“Anna,” Avon said. Seeing her alive and, indeed, apparently in the bloom of health (although the gray uniform was not the most flattering to her complexion) gave him far less joy than he would ever have believed.

“Quite,” Servalan said. “Not to mention Bartolomew of Central Security.”

“Well, that was a depth of idiocy I never thought myself capable of,” Avon said. 

Anna shrugged. “I’m not surprised.”

“What about *my* reward?” Travis said, raising his Lazeron arm.

Blake’s brooding was interrupted by Avon knocking him to the floor. Blake thought that was uncalled for: Blake hadn’t knocked Avon to the floor, and he was the injured party. Then Blake realized that Avon must have had a heart, otherwise the beam would have gone through-and-through.

Avon rapidly devised a plan say, “O I am fortune’s fool,” but there was no time left for anything longer than “Blake!”

The next moment, Sula said, “We need Blake, you fucking moron,” and shot Travis in his good eye. 

Knowing that it was the last time he would ever hold Avon in his arms, Blake rolled what was now a generic corpse (he could tell, he’d seen so very many of them lately), as gently as he could, to the floor. Realizing that he might not get to do anything else, ever, after a moment crouching next to Avon’s body, with his hand on Avon’s shoulder, Blake stood up so at least he could die on his feet. 

Blake pointed at Travis’ body. “Get him out of here,” he said. “I don’t want him in the same room with us.”

“Very imperious, aren’t we?” Anna said. “Why, do you think I’m going to kill you? Were you not listening?”

“It’s been an eventful few minutes.” Blake glanced down at the front of his tunic, where Avon’s blood was drying. “’Go, bid the soldiers shoot,’” Blake said. And, as if they were just waiting in the wings, six soldiers, wearing gray uniforms like Sula’s, marched in. Their leader saluted. “Residence One is secured, General.”

“Very good,” Anna said. “Now take that woman—“ (gesturing toward Servalan) “—and lock her in the wine cellar. Why anyone would need chains in a wine cellar is beyond me. But it’ll do until we can arrange a transfer for her trial. And fetch some clean clothes for the President-Elect.” 

“Ma’am,” the leader said, and saluted. Servalan realized that now “ma’am” was Anna, which saddened her more than her ongoing arrest frightened her. She widened her eyes, and tucked her hand into the crook of one of the soldier’s elbows, patting it gently. “I’m sure you’ll take good care of me,” she told her escort. 

“She won’t fight you,” Anna said. “She hasn’t got the bottle. Never did.”

Servalan ignored her, and turned to Blake.

“It’s a very old wall, Blake,” Servalan said. “It waits.”

EPIGRAPH  
 _It is good to be merry and wise.  
It is good to be honest and true.  
It is best to be off with the old love,  
Before you are on with the new. _ (Songs of England and Scotland, 1835)

 _Never be the first to believe.  
Never be the last to deceive.  
Nobody’s on nobody’s side. _ (Chess)


End file.
